Spanish Town Mails Back Poop

Just what does it take to get people to pick up their dog’s poop? In Brunete, a town in Spain, they has come up with a fairly ingenious way of cracking down on non-poop-picking-up dog owners. Not only did their strategy work but a media campaign was developed for free by advertising agency McCann, and it went on to win the “Sol de Plata” award at a recent Ibero-American Advertising Festival.

So just what did they do?

Community volunteers strolled the town’s streets looking for offending dog owners, those who totally ignored the poop and did not scoop. They came up to the owner and struck up a casual conversation to discover the name of the dog.

“With the name of the dog and the breed it was possible to identify the owner from the registered pet database held in the town hall,” explained a spokesman from the council.

Here’s the really clever part.

The volunteers then scooped up the excrement and packaged it in a box branded with town hall insignia and marked ‘Lost Property’ and delivered by courier to the pet owners home.

In all, 147 “express poop” deliveries were made during the course of the week in February and the town with 10,000 residents has since reported a 70 per cent drop in the amount of dog mess found in its streets.

The year before a similar attempt to tackle the issue saw offending dog owners chased by a remote controlled dog mess on wheels with the label “Don’t leave me—pick me up.”